The Bookshop Of Yesterdays - Amy Meyerson

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was more often the type to add his name to whatever present Mom had bought me. Perhaps the phrase was a song lyric or a fortune-cookie truism, a catchphrase from one of those New Age books Joanie half-jokingly quoted. Only I heard future not in Joanie’s raspy voice, but in a soft lullaby. A deep, dreamy voice that should have inspired comfort. Instead, it hit me with acute longing, regret.

      Maybe the phrase was one of Prospero’s lines, although it lacked Shakespeare’s measure. Still, it sounded like something Prospero might have said to the audience in his final goodbye. I flipped through the text. The epilogue wasn’t marked, but in the second scene of the play, when Prospero told Miranda how his brother had run them out of Milan, Prospero’s words were highlighted.

      ’Tis time I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand and pluck my magic garment from me. So lie there, my art.

      Sit down; for thou must now know farther.

      Thou must now know farther. Understanding prepares us for the future. If not for the similarity in theme, I would have assumed the highlighted section was the random marking of the copy’s previous owner, but Prospero’s words, the line from the card...they were connected. Only, I wasn’t certain how.

      I plugged the phrase from the card into my phone’s search engine. A few hundred musings on education and religion popped up. No direct quotations of the line itself. It wasn’t a reference to The Tempest. As far as I could tell, it wasn’t a saying at all. Still, I was certain I’d heard it before.

      I tucked the play into my dresser and taped the card to the fridge, hoping the beach scene might jog my memory. The woman’s happy face followed me as I sprayed down the countertops. Although her eyes were shaded, they monitored my every move. When I looked up, I expected her expression to have changed. Of course it never did and after a few glances at her windblown hair, her blank smile, I started to feel like she knew something I didn’t.

      * * *

      By nightfall, our apartment was ready for the festivities to begin. A handful of our colleagues, Jay’s soccer buddies and my college friends arrived early with salads, couscous, chicken and cake.

      We settled onto the living room floor, wineglasses at our sides, paper plates nestled into our laps. Everyone was talking animatedly. It was the party I would have preferred, just close friends, people you didn’t have to ask yourself how they’d ended up at your house. I sat between Jay and the art teacher. Jay coached soccer at the high school and had become the other eighth-grade history teacher earlier that year when Teacher Anne’s maternity leave turned permanent. Before he joined my ranks, I’d seen him from a distance, knew how his muscular calves looked beneath his mesh shorts, how his whistle burst in sharp tweets when he wanted to get the boys’ attention. He was good-looking in a preppy way I wasn’t normally attracted to, but he had this magnetic energy that made female teachers young and old giggle when he said hello to them. A charisma so powerful the school was desperate to keep him. They offered him the position of eighth-grade American history teacher even though he’d been an economics major in college and had never taught before. I was tasked with getting him up to speed, a job that involved more history lessons than I would have expected, evenings and weekend study sessions where I taught him about the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, the contentious election of 1800, the duel between Hamilton and Burr. He grinned apishly as I explained to him how candidates used to run on their own and whoever came in second, regardless of party, was awarded the vice presidency. I’d accused him of not listening, and he’d said, You’re so passionate. It’s adorable, and then I’d grinned apishly, too, and soon those grins had led to something more.

      I’d assumed it would be a tryst, greeting each other in the halls as Teacher Miranda and Teacher Jay, as though we’d never seen each other naked, until the secrecy felt rote. Turned out Jay was more than athletic legs and an inviting smile. He spoke about soccer like it was art, a metaphor for life. He knew everyone in his—now our—neighborhood by name, helping the aging Mrs. Peters carry her groceries to her third-floor apartment, and walking his friend Trevor’s mutt when Trevor couldn’t get out of work in time to let her out. He was close with his parents, never losing patience with his mom, telling her he liked the collared shirts she bought him, shirts that gathered dust in his closet, and hanging her bland artwork across his—now our—walls. He was close to his sister, who lived a few blocks away and was currently sitting across from us, flirting with my college friend as she snuck sideways glances at Jay and me, still not quite accustomed to our partnership.

      “How’d your last day go?” I asked Jay. I didn’t want to talk about school, but I was still learning how to be with Jay in a crowd. We spent so much of our time alone that I had to remind myself I couldn’t pounce on him when others were around; I couldn’t ask him to divulge his feelings in the way that caused him to blush.

      Jay proceeded to describe his last day of class, a well-plotted game of Murder that the students probably enjoyed more than my lesson on Abraham Lincoln. That was the difference between me and Jay. He knew how to win them over. I knew how to teach them something they might not value today, but in a few years would resonate, at least so I hoped. So much of being a teacher rests in that blind hope. Jay reached over to play with one of my curls, and I kissed him on the cheek, testing out what it felt like to display affection in front of friends and colleagues. That kiss was the physical equivalent of changing your Facebook relationship status, a pronouncement that, while not quite irreversible, was indelible.

      By eleven, the randoms started turning up. Friends of friends of friends—Jay greeted them all. He slapped high five to guys in baseball caps and hugged girls in tight, bright tank tops whom I’d never met before. I could imagine the back and forth he had with those tall, muscular guys, details about Saturday morning soccer league and woes of the Phillies’ latest loss. I couldn’t imagine the conversations Jay had with those girls. I tried not to be too obvious as I watched them talk. Jay’s sister caught me staring, an unmistakable smirk on her face.

      As more strangers crowded our apartment, the living room became unbearably hot. Someone turned the stereo so loud you couldn’t talk, you couldn’t think, you could only dance. I stood against the wall with Jay, watching the gaggle of brightly clad girls move effortlessly to the electronic beat. Couples bumped into each other as they danced, sloshing beer onto our hardwood floors. Desire radiated from Jay’s body and I wanted to get lost in him, to turn the corner of our living room into our private lair. Jay tapped his foot against the baseboard and asked if I wanted to dance.

      We sidled in beside the group of girls, cognizant of their fluidity. I tried to be fluid, too, but dancing always made me overly aware of the orders my brain issued to my body and my legs’ inability to enact them. Jay wasn’t a good dancer, either, and we laughed at how terribly we moved, inching closer to each other until the beat became ours, until Jay’s desires aligned with mine.

      My phone vibrated in my pocket. Normally, I would have ignored it, but the buzzer to our apartment worked intermittently despite my countless calls to the super to fix it, and I didn’t want one of my friends to be trapped outside. When I saw it was Mom, I knew instantly that something was wrong. Mom and I had spoken that morning. She’d given me her recipe for fresh-squeezed brown derbies, which I hadn’t had the heart to tell her would have been wasted on me and my cheap beer-drinking contemporaries. While we often spoke more than once a day, she wouldn’t have called during my party unless something had happened.

      I angled the phone toward Jay so he could see that it was Mom, and we spoke in gestures. He shrugged his shoulders, asking if everything was okay. I swatted away the worry I felt, motioning that I was slipping outside. I fought the current of people out of the apartment.

      “What’s wrong?” I asked as I stepped onto the stoop.

      “I’m sorry to interrupt your party.”

      “Is everything okay?” I sat on the top step.

      “I figured you’d want to know. I didn’t feel right not telling you right away because I thought—”

      “Mom, what happened? You’re scaring me.”

      “I just got a call. It’s Billy.” All the alcohol in my system

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